Syria has gone from bad to worse, with nationwide aerial bombings by Syrian President Bashar Assad’s warplanes and more bomb attacks by the opposition. The IDF remains on high alert at the Golan Heights border.
Explosions shook Syria’s capital on Monday as warplanes launched their heaviest air raids yet and two car bombs struck, an AFP correspondent said.
One bomb struck the predominantly Christian and Druze area of Jaramana, just outside Damascus, killing 11 people, according to state-run news agency SANA.
The second hit several hours later in the southern Al-Hajar Al-Aswad district, which has seen heavy fighting, causing an unknown number of casualties, state television reported.
World powers looked to pick up the pieces of a failed effort for a Muslim holiday ceasefire, with envoy Lakhdar Brahimi in Moscow and due in China on Tuesday as he prepares to present new ideas to the UN Security Council.
“I have said and it bears repeating again and again that the Syrian crisis is very, very dangerous, the situation is bad and getting worse,” Brahimi said after talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
On Monday, the final day of the four-day Eid al-Adha holiday, the Syrian military launched more than 60 air strikes around the country, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
“These are the heaviest air strikes since warplanes were first deployed over the summer,” the watchdog’s director, Rami Abdel Rahman, told AFP.
The regime continues to blame “terrorists” for the chaos. “On the fourth and last day of the declared truce, armed terrorist groups continued to launch attacks on unarmed citizens, and targeted army and security checkpoints,” a military statement said.
The Syrian uprising began in March 2011 as a peaceful movement and has escalated into a destructive civil war that has claimed at least 35,000 lives, most of them victims of unprecedented attacks by Assad’s army on civilians, including women and children.
It has exposed the United Nations as totally powerless to stop the violence, largely because Russia and China have refused to join Western efforts to censure the Assad regime and it impose punishing sanctions on it.
